Gurmion Accepted into İTÜ Çekirdek Acceleration Program 2026
We're excited to share a milestone: Gurmion has been accepted into the İTÜ Çekirdek Acceleration Program 2026 cohort.
İTÜ Çekirdek is one of Turkey's most prestigious startup acceleration programs, operating under Istanbul Technical University. Each year, it selects a small number of startups from hundreds of applications, providing mentorship, resources, and ecosystem access.
Not a Recipe Finder — a System That Runs Your Kitchen
Gurmion is not a recipe search engine. It's an AI-powered Kitchen Operating System that takes over the entire operation of your kitchen.
Here's what that means in practice:
- Kiler (Pantry) recognizes your ingredients from a photo, tracks expiration dates, and automatically adds items running low to your shopping list. No more manual inventory.
- Mutfak (Kitchen) doesn't just suggest recipes — it knows what's in your pantry, factors in your budget, remembers your dietary restrictions, and makes a real decision considering all of it together.
- Defter (Notebook) collects your recipes, calculates per-portion costs, and provides profit margin analysis for businesses. It's a cost control center, not a recipe binder.
- Plan (Calendar) creates your weekly meal plan, writes it to Google Calendar, and generates your shopping list. Planning, reminders, and coordination — automated.
These modules don't work in isolation — they coordinate through a shared agent infrastructure. Mutfak knows when Kiler has expiring items. Defter cost-analyzes the recipes Plan schedules. This isn't a feature checklist; it's an integrated operations system.
How It Works
"What should I cook?" seems like a simple question, but behind it lies an entire operations chain: pantry inventory check, budget calculation, dietary restrictions, weekly variety, shopping list, calendar coordination. Gurmion handles this entire chain in a single conversation.
When you request a weekly meal plan, here's what runs behind the scenes:
- Inventory scan: Your current ingredients are read from the Kiler module — everything you've previously scanned via photo or added manually
- Preference and constraint analysis: Your dietary restrictions, allergens, household size, and budget targets are evaluated
- Plan generation: The AI agent produces a 7-day plan that prioritizes your existing ingredients while maintaining variety
- Shopping list: Ingredients used in the plan but missing from your pantry are automatically added to your shopping list
- Calendar sync: The plan is written to Google Calendar — what to cook and when, right in your schedule
Each step in this flow is executed by a separate agent, and agents coordinate with each other. The result: a single chat message produces an end-to-end plan from your pantry to your calendar.
On the pantry side, Vision AI lets you snap a photo of your fridge and automatically build your ingredient list. The system tracks expiration dates and prioritizes items about to expire when generating plans — waste reduction is a natural part of how the system operates, not a separate feature.
For Businesses: Food Cost and Menu Engineering
The same agent infrastructure powers a different mode for restaurants and food businesses. In the B2B module, every query is answered in a business context:
- Food cost analysis: Enter a recipe and get ingredient-level cost breakdowns, per-portion costs, and target selling prices. Not just an ingredient list — waste ratios and gram-based unit costs included.
- Profit margin analysis: Calculates gross profit margins for each dish against your current menu prices. Flags items falling below your target margin and suggests price or portion adjustments.
- Menu engineering: Analyzes your menu across popularity and profitability axes — categorizing dishes as stars, puzzles, workhorses, and dogs. Shows which items to promote and which to revise.
- Staff meal planning: Creates daily staff meal plans — factoring in headcount, budget, and ingredients that don't overlap with your customer menu.
- Cost trends: Analyzes ingredient price trends from your purchase history. Which items are rising, which are stable — with period-over-period comparison.
Why İTÜ Çekirdek?
İTÜ Çekirdek's strong technical ecosystem and mentor network will provide the support we need as we scale Gurmion's agentic AI infrastructure.
During the program, we're focused on:
- Agent infrastructure: Proactive agents, automatic inventory updates, smart notifications
- B2B expansion: Reaching restaurants and food businesses
- Team growth: Expanding our technical and growth teams
- Investment process: Preparing for our seed funding round
The Journey Continues
Gurmion is still early — but it's making kitchens more efficient every day. Scan your pantry, build your first weekly plan, and start saving time.
Stay tuned — over the coming months, we'll be sharing both product updates and our İTÜ Çekirdek experience.